The artist at Filmation gave poor ol' Mr. Kyle red hair and a big handlebar moustache, iirc.
TAS... Sigh
- Thread starter FalTorPan
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^ At least poor ol' Mr. Kyle wasn't sporting pink hair like the tribbles!! 
Ratings - wise, does anyone know if TAS was considered a success/failure?
I saw it for the first time about five years ago - it was bittersweet, watching and thinking this will be my last 'new' TOS.
I don't mean to offend the posters who were introduced to Trek through TAS as kids in he 70's but creatively, I'd have to call it a disappointment overall. Sure, there were two or three gems, and my three year old loves it, but it's not a patch on TOS.
I seem to recall Roddenberry going out of his way to erase it from existence in his later years.
I saw it for the first time about five years ago - it was bittersweet, watching and thinking this will be my last 'new' TOS.
I don't mean to offend the posters who were introduced to Trek through TAS as kids in he 70's but creatively, I'd have to call it a disappointment overall. Sure, there were two or three gems, and my three year old loves it, but it's not a patch on TOS.
I seem to recall Roddenberry going out of his way to erase it from existence in his later years.
The series won the 1975 Emmy in the category of “Outstanding Entertainment - Children's Series.” Other nominees in the category were General Hospital, Jeopardy!, Baretta, and The Godfather Book II.
When I first heard the title “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” for me it conjured images of the children of the original crew now having their own ship and own adventures.Star Trek themed Kid's Show?..
Look here..
So when he came back for ST II, he countered with a blond/grey goatee.
Sadly, unless an animated TV series gets gangbuster Saturday morning ratings, the formula used to employ the voice cast becomes unwieldy after two seasons. TAS got average ratings. The TV stations noticed that reruns (of any animated series) rate the same as new episodes, so why keep churning out new ones - but then that particular cohort of kids also moves on to other things. Notice that even the well-received, highly acclaimed "Batman" animated series of the late 80s/early 90s re-kick-started itself every few seasons with a title tweak, new opening music, character additions, costume/design changes, etc. - essentially starting the episode count from scratch again, mainly to keep the accountants happy.
Richard Arnold did.
And, even then, all the ST Office tried to do was stop the novels and comics from referencing TAS in the licensed tie-ins. There was a fear that the tie-in products weren't using the parent shows (TOS & TNG) as the canonical source. RA attempted to stamp out the licensees (Pocket, DC Comics and FASA) increasing practice of sharing original characters and ship designs.But then, Filmation was also being liquidated in 1989 - and DC Fontana and David Gerrold were contesting GR in court over co-creatorship of TNG, so you can understand if GR's lawyers were advising him to distance himself from TAS. (There was recently a thread on this.)
They were setiing it aside, not erasing TAS from existence.
Well, it got a second season (of six episodes), which is more than a lot of Filmation series did. Back then, it was pretty standard for a Saturday morning show to just make one season and rerun it for a few years, and if it stayed on in reruns long enough, it might get a crop of new episodes every several years. (I think Fat Albert had new episodes about every fourth year, give or take.) So I figure TAS must've been okay.
Sure, it doesn't have many real standouts, but it was a noble effort to continue the series, I think. I mean, if you compare it to other '70s or '80s animated sequels/spinoffs to live-action shows, it's atypically faithful to the original. I mean, Hanna-Barbera gave us a Happy Days cartoon spinoff where Fonzie travelled through time with "a future chick named Cupcake" an a Partridge Family cartoon that basically plugged the Partridges into the world of The Jetsons. Filmation sometimes made similarly great departures in its adaptations, like The Brady Kids, which dropped the adults from The Brady Bunch and sent the kids on wacky adventures with a bunch of talking animals, one of which was a wizard. But it also did a number of very faithful adaptations. Filmation's Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle was more faithful to the original Edgar Rice Burroughs novels' concepts and mythology than any prior screen adaptation of Tarzan and just about any subsequent one, and its Flash Gordon (at least in the first season, before it was dumbed down) was a lovingly faithful adaptation of Alex Raymond's comic strips. TAS was done in the same tradition of fidelity to the source.
So in the context of its time and format, TAS was an atypically faithful continuation of the original, and about as good a continuation as we could've expected. I give it full credit for that.
Late in life, Roddenberry got very picky about what was and wasn't true to his vision, and largely excluded stuff that he wasn't personally responsible for. He questioned the canonicity of some of the movies, and even considered some of TOS to be apocryphal.
The Godfather, a children's series? That just goes to show how little faith you can place in award shows' nomination categories.
And of course most anyone back then would've assumed a cartoon was a "children's series" even if it was written to be suitable for adults, because there's long been a pervasive prejudice that any cartoon is automatically for kids. But that doesn't make it true.
Yeah, that was always kind of a problematical title for a series that was set several generations further along.
Interesting to imagine what that might've been like, though. Say, Captain Peter Kirk, his first officer Saavik, Dr. Joanna McCoy... Hmm, since TWOK gave Scotty a nephew (even though that was cut), maybe another nephew or niece could've been created... (I won't include Demora Sulu, since that character hadn't been created yet when TNG was developed.)
You can look at Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids as a good example of how the networks did cartoon programming. The show ran from 1972 to 1985, but according to Wiki, there were years they didn't produce a new episode:
I wish the animated episode had had that run!
- Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert — November 12, 1969
- Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids — 1972–73 (22 episodes), 1975–76 (14 episodes)
- The Fat Albert Halloween Special — October 24, 1977
- The Fat Albert Christmas Special — December 18, 1977
- The New Fat Albert Show — 1979–81 (24 episodes)
- The Fat Albert Easter Special — April 3, 1982
- The Adventures of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids — 1984–85 (50 episodes)
I wish the animated episode had had that run!
Yeah, most Filmation shows only had one season's worth of episodes, sometimes two, even if they ran for several years. Fat Albert was exceptional in its longevity. I think Shazam! had three seasons.
This tracks well with my comments about the 90s era "Batman" animateds. Notice how "Fat Albert" underwent constant title changes. The voice cast's contracts were probably renegotiated each season, as if it were for a brand new show.
^And some of the voice cast changed in the later Fat Albert seasons, I believe.
Hell, Bill Cosby was half of the voice cast all by himself.
Richard Arnold did.
But then, Filmation was also being liquidated in 1989 - and DC Fontana and David Gerrold were contesting GR in court over co-creatorship of TNG, so you can understand if GR's lawyers were advising him to distance himself from TAS. (There was recently a thread on this.)
They were setiing it aside, not erasing TAS from existence.
Richard Arnold was pretty much left to run amok by Roddenberry and the others because RA was willing to take care of stuff, like licensee stuff, that they didn't want to mess with. Unfortunately, this gave the glorified gofer a sense of authority to which he really wasn't entitled. And since he apparently had a bug up his posterior regarding TAS in the first place, Roddenberry's directive to not reference it gave Richard all the justification he needed to announce from Mount Olypmus that TAS was OUT!!
To the best of my digging, the WGA grievances from Fontana and Gerrold didn't really play any part in the whole thing; it was at best a sideshow. The Filmation mess would've been enough all by its lonesome to keep TAS out of play.
Not quite half. He was Albert, Bill (of course), Mushmouth, and the recurring character Mudfoot, plus the Brown Hornet in the later seasons (which I didn't like as much, but which are the only ones available on Hulu). So only three of the eight central characters.
And IMDb says the cast didn't change over the course of the series. But I do recall the names in the closing voice credits having some differences in the later seasons. Maybe it's just that the early seasons had an incomplete cast list, or maybe one or two of the performers used different names at different times (a number of Filmation contributors used pseudonyms). Or maybe the cast did change and IMDb's information is incomplete. Some of the characters sound different to me in the later episodes. Maybe it's because they were played by young actors whose voices changed as they grew up between seasons?
They also might not be doing the voices the same way. If there was a big interval between tapings, sometimes it's not all that easy to find that character voice again.
Thanks, all, some great info here.
Were there ever any thoughts of a third season of TAS?
Beware relying on Wikipedia for facts, but some more info from this Wikipedia entry for TAS :
Worth mentioning Nimoy's incredibly selfless act of refusing to sign on for the show unless Nichelle Nichols, George Takei and Walter Koenig were included. Good on him
Actually, it probably did the show a big favour - I find Majel Barrett and Jimmy Doohan's voices to be a bit overused as it is - it would have been a lot worse had they attempted to do Uhura and Sulu as well, as was planned.
Were there ever any thoughts of a third season of TAS?
Beware relying on Wikipedia for facts, but some more info from this Wikipedia entry for TAS :
Worth mentioning Nimoy's incredibly selfless act of refusing to sign on for the show unless Nichelle Nichols, George Takei and Walter Koenig were included. Good on him
Actually, it probably did the show a big favour - I find Majel Barrett and Jimmy Doohan's voices to be a bit overused as it is - it would have been a lot worse had they attempted to do Uhura and Sulu as well, as was planned.
:facepalm:
I was joking. The other nominees were Captain Kangaroo and the Pink Panther.
IIRC, there was a slim possibility of a further six new episodes, plus reruns to fill out the season. Contractually, the cast would have received significant jumps in salary, breaking the budget.
I seem to recall an interview with Howard Weinstein ("The Pirates of Orion"), in which he said he had a pitch approved for a script for a potential third season. This may have become the kernel of one of his future Pocket novels.
Nichols did a lot more than just Uhura. Also Takei had a hilariously awful turn as a cloud thingamajig in Megas Tu.
To provide some context, though, keep in mind that this is only referring to Filmation's NBC shows. Most of their shows were on CBS. And the Batman & The Super 7 show on NBC was actually a revamping of an earlier CBS show called Tarzan & The Super 7 (both were packages of various half-hour and 15-minute Filmation adventure series in an extended block), so the overall Super 7 ran longer than that paragraph suggests, and included individual segments that had longer runs.
But those last couple of sentences are telling. TAS was "not popular enough with young children." Not surprising, since it wasn't aimed primarily at them. (Although I was 5 years old when I started watching, and I liked it just fine.)
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